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UCSD's Geisel Library. Image via Wikipedia

You read right. The righteous redistributionists at the Washington Monthly Magazine have announced their annual ranking of colleges and universities. And University of California-San Diego (UCSD) came out on top, followed by UCLA, the University of California-Berkeley, Stanford, the University of California-Riverside, Harvard, Case Western Reserve, the University of California-Davis, Jackson State University, and the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Traditional academic stalwarts like the University of Chicago (25), Columbia (26), Princeton (31), Yale (39), and my alma mater of Northwestern (67) did not come remotely close to cracking the top ten.

If these rankings seem strange, this is because the well-intentioned folks at the Washington Monthly do not want parents, teachers, counselors, administrators, and students to focus on those time-honored criteria -- such as graduation and retention rates, student selectivity, acceptance rates, standardized test scores, class rankings of incoming students, and student/faculty ratio -- that we have come to accept as reliable metrics of collegiate quality.

Instead, the Monthly believes we should base college rankings, and, by extension, college selection, on a simple, if vague, metric: “contribution to the public good.” They break this metric into three categories: “Social Mobility (recruiting and graduating low-income students), Research (producing cutting-edge scholarship and PhDs), and Service (encouraging students to give something back to their country).”

In the Monthly’s empirically unsubstantiated view, "conventional" college ranking systems display a mercenary bias, and, thus, a decided Ivy League tilt. In a fair paraphrase of the Monthly’s reductivist Introduction, every smart Ivy League history major who went to work for a Wall Street hedge fund is an immoral destroyer of jobs, lives, and the greater economy. And every non-Ivy history major that joined Teach for America is working for "the public good." The hedge fund venture philanthropists at, say, the generous and profitable Robin Hood Foundation -- which seeks to alleviate the root causes of poverty in New York City -- might quibble with the Monthly's broad brush assessment, but I digress.

Relying on the famous JFK dictum about public service from his January 20, 1961 Inaugural Address – “ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country” -- the Monthly makes no secret of its desire to see colleges move more students into "progressive" (read: publicly financed) fields of endeavor. The Peace Corps, for example. As a socially liberal registered independent, I believe selfless service is a wonderful thing, especially when chosen voluntarily, and when there is no delimiting definition of "public service." However, the Monthly not only seems to have forgotten the leftist argument that the Peace Corps is a stalking horse for U.S. economic imperialism, they provide few concrete examples of what they mean by service, or precisely how the sundry majors at most colleges do not in some way contribute "to the public good." But again I digress.

President Kennedy, who created the Peace Corps, spoke his immortal lines about service at a time of extraordinary American prosperity, when the American economic juggernaut enabled generous public service outreach. Sadly, the Washington Monthly seems blind to economic context, as if more public spending will magically reproduce the glorious economic world of 1961, inflation, high taxes, and deficits be damned. This is most evident in the Monthly's explanation of its elaborate cost-blind ranking methodology, in which the magazine gives snide clues on how schools can ingratiate themselves into the Monthly's sanctimonious good graces.

As you can see from a review of the Monthly's methodology, there are inherent problems with its approach, as well as alternative causalities for its rankings. First, perhaps many of the graduates of the Monthly’s Top 10 schools ended up in social service occupations because they lacked the training, competency, or inclination to pursue work in more higher-paying fields, many of which -- including the in-demand STEM fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math -- also have empirically proven social and economic benefits. Secondly, the reason that five of the top ten colleges on the Washington Monthly list are California public colleges and universities might be because of the public works bias of those academic institutions. That is, as publicly financed institutions, with teachers and administrators on the public payroll, the culture of those institutions might, directly or by osmosis, attract students interested in publicly financed service work, and/or, by extension, encourage students, upon graduation, to enter into publicly financed occupations, as opposed to private sector work. In addition, state schools, as a rule, charge lower tuition than private institutions. Thus, it might be more financially feasible for a state school graduate to work for a spell in some poverty-stricken part of Africa because his or her student loan bills are less.

Furthermore, because of the universal bashing that all banks received from the Obama administration (though only a small number of large investment banks directly engaged in high-risk subprime loans and/or collateralized debt obligations), as well as the economic downturn brought on, in part, by housing buyers taking on loans they knew they could not afford (and lying about their net worth on mortgage applications in order to procure those loans), those lucrative financial services jobs that the Monthly's editors excoriate have substantially declined. Along with those job cuts have come huge job losses in the consulting, engineering, and software development fields that feed the financial services sector. Thus, it might be that more students are naturally pushed into public service work because high-paying or even decent-paying private sector work has dried up.

As a result of the financial crisis, the Monthly deduces we are witnessing a renaissance of interest in public service work. The kids have suddenly got Great Society religion. That is, the Monthly's Ivy League history major caricature suddenly wants to join the Peace Corps because of the perceived evils of Wall Street. Sorry. Their Ivy League graduate is likely joining the Peace Corps because decent-paying private sector jobs have disappeared, and, until recently -- when budget-cutting fever took hold of the nation -- only public sector work remained plentiful. Mark my words: that Ivy League grad and millions of other intellectually ambitious grads (whatever their alma mater) will jump the public sector ship as soon as decent-paying private sector jobs return.

Also, as a final bit of alternative causality, it’s possible that many of those pursuing public service work come from backgrounds where Dad and Mum can afford to let Megan and Evan coast before securing higher-paying work. In other words, those evil capitalists that the Washington Montly maligns are providing a safety net for graduates to serve “the public good.” Moreover, all taxpayers are providing a similar safety net for public universities that fund similar altruism.

But a bias towards low-paying social work financed on the public dime is not the most troubling aspect of the Washington Monthly rankings. It is, rather, the criterion -- one-third of each college's score – that the WM editors call "social mobility." By “social mobility,” the Monthly's social engineers want to know how committed each institution of higher learning is to providing financial aid, work-study, and other freebies. It’s no surprise they love taxpayer-supported colleges in general, and the California public colleges in particular, which have historically been financially generous to in-state students.

By contrast, the Monthly editors take the more generally rigorous Washington University in St. Louis to the progressive woodshed because only 5% of Washington's undergraduates receive Pell Grants. In the Monthly's words, "Wash U appears to be more focused on itself than on everyone else." What the Washington Monthly editors ignore is that one reason their educational Shangri-LA of California is currently in a budget hole is because of the extraordinary educational largesse of the University of California and California State college systems (in salaries, pensions, and, yes, student aid). Even if, technically, most needy UCal and Cal State students receive financial aid from the federal government, and not the state of California, such generous support is still a substantial net loss to the UCal and Cal State systems compared to, say, the full tuition coming from out-of-state or foreign students. This is a major reason why the ten-campus University of California system is actively raising the numbers of out-of-state and international students they accept. Not only do these out-of-state and foreign students pay a three-times higher rate of tuition, they must pass a far tougher educational benchmark to gain acceptance.

Meanwhile, in these tough times, even an academically rigorous private school like Washington in St. Louis (a ridiculous 112th in the Washington Monthly rankings) -- or CalTech (ranked 69th) or Dartmouth (ranked 74th) -- must scramble for every dime it gets, especially from those rich benefactors whose stock market portfolios have been savaged by the very class warfare rhetoric, and concomitant onerous anti-banking regulations, that the Washington Monthly adores. Oh, and by the way, a closer look at the Monthly’s favorite whipping boy reveals a staggering array of “global and regional initiatives” at Washington University in St. Louis to promote precisely the values that the Monthly extols. All the politically correct buzzwords are right there on the front page of the Washington in St. Louis website, including “global engagement, community service,” and the all-important “diversity" (the one buzzword guaranteed to send liberal admissions counselors, Women's Studies majors, and Marcuse-ian Political Science Professors into hyperventilating ecstasy).

In one of the more empirical, and widely followed, measures of academic strength, the U.S. News World Report Best Colleges rankings, UCSD ranks far down the list at 35 in what U.S. News dubs “national universities,” while Washington University in St. Louis ranks 13th. The Washington Monthly considers the U.S. News rankings "elitist," a progressive code word for schools that primarily focus on academic excellence in the classroom before other social criteria.

But aren’t academics the primary purpose of a college? And aren't we, as consumers of education, justified in making our college choices on the scholastic merits of an institution and its students, instead of on the school's number of Pell grant recipients? Especially since there are no academic requirements to receive a Pell Grant and a bogus minimal academic standard called "satisfactory academic progress" (basically a 1.5 GPA) to continue receiving a Pell Grant once enrolled in college?

Clearly, for any reasonable education consumer, there are several problems with the Washington Monthly Pell Grant standard. First, as I have noted repeatedly in previous posts, Pell grant recipients, no mater where they go to college, are more likely to drop out of college. Therefore, it is extremely risky, especially in these tough economic times, for any school, for-profit or not, to be giving out anything free, even at the government's behest. Furthermore, those who receive federal financial aid are also far more likely to default on their student loans.

Secondly, Pell grants have almost no stimulating effect on the economy. The President loaded an additional $15 billion of Pell grant money into his much-lauded fiscal stimulus. The unemployment rate remains, in real terms, higher than it was before the stimulus package. By contrast, studies show, that when a student has even a little bit of financial skin in the education game, he or she is far more likely to value the education experience, to graduate, and to find meaningful employment.

Thirdly, the naive folks at the Washington Monthly praise Jackson State (ranked number 9) and South Carolina State (18th in the rankings) because they admit many students with less-than-stellar SATs and GPAs. Please answer me this: how is it in the interest of those with stellar SATs and GPAs to be in the same classroom, and paying a higher tuition no less, than those with far lower SATs and GPAs? We all know the result of this practice: the dumbing down of the curriculum to appease those with lower drive and academic skills. Is this how the Monthly intends to foster the Kennedy ideal of bringing "the best and brightest" into public service?

Fourth, because a school “graduates” more low-income students tells me absolutely nothing about the academic quality of those students or whether they are trained in the skills employers actually need.

Fifth, and most troubling, by encouraging schools and governments to give out more financial aid, the Monthly is actually fostering the very bubble (in education loans) that they castigate Wall Street for enabling in the housing sector. I have written about the advancing student loan debacle, which the Washington Monthly folks blithely make worse.

As I’ve explained in past columns, the way to insure “public good,” including social mobility, public service, and better educated graduates, is not to make college admissions standards easier, but to make them tougher for everyone, so that one has to actually work hard to get into college, starting in primary school and continuing onto secondary school. With such a Gainful Student Standard, we will start to turn out intellectually prepared students who can immediately seize the high-paying jobs of today, and, in turn, and in time, give back to their communities in whatever way they define "the public good.”

Right now, we give students every excuse in the world to delay waking up academically until they reach college. And the Washington Monthly seems to believe that not only is this a beneficial thing, it’s equally beneficial to let students compensate for their poor classroom achievement with vaguely defined “service” in their “communities.” Please tell me how this helps anyone, except self-perpetuating government service programs whose only metric of success are their own politically-gifted existence.

But beyond their narrow and misguided criteria of “service” and “social mobility,” the wise folks at the Washington Monthly have a third, and seemingly academics-based metric -- to reassure us that it isn’t just “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” at Monthly headquarters -- that they call “Research.” Now what do the all-knowing geniuses at the Monthly mean by “Research”? Amongst a welter of criteria unrelated to pedagogical success in the classroom, foremost in their minds seems to be the number of graduates who go on to get Ph.Ds. As if getting a Ph.D, any Ph.D, in any subject, was, by its nature qua nature, a guarantor of "the public good."

Do not let their paean to military recruitment fool you (the Monthly gives extra credit for the number of students enrolled in ROTC programs). Because, surely, if your Ph.D is in the science of quant investing, or military intelligence, or -- Allah, Adorno, or Alinsky, forbid -- natural gas fracking, that would not so easily warm the progressive hearts at the Washington Monthly. It should, thus, comes as no surprise that those ultimate warriors for, and protectors of, the public good, the military academies, do not even make an appearance in the 258 colleges and universities ranked by the Washington Monthly.